Drops in google serps down to 301 errors?

[inertia]

Hi guys,

A client of mine dropped several pages for some of his major keywords last week (they also lost 1PR in the tool bar update). This came as somewhat of a surprise as the site is consistently building natural links/content and the link profile is far healthier than it was at the last update.

Obviously, myself and the client are pretty annoyed at this uncharacteristic drop. So, i've been hunting around for answers. I found some thoughts on SEO Ibiza's blog which may explain a slight drop but not one as significant and specific as this. But what i found most interesting was the errors which were reported back in GWT:




(Although the error details are labelled differently they both give the same advice popup)

The errors are occurring on 301 redirects that are crucial to the rankings of some of the keywords that have slipped. One redirect in particular is from an old home page address to the root domain. This old home page had picked up plenty of links so an error in the redirect would loose the site plenty of juice.

So i checked these links manually and they were redirecting fine... I also checked them with View HTTP Request and Response Header and they gave the right response codes. But i have observed slow loading pages when working on the site before, which i had put down to hosting issues.

So do people think that Googlebot could have hit the site when the server was running slow and this has caused the problem? The dates on the above errors and the date when the site dropped (about a day or 2 later) all match up? There is also a small news feed on the site which runs from an access db. Does anyone think this could be causing a problem as a slow running db would prevent the page from loading?

(btw - we use fasthost shared windows hosting and we are in the process of moving sites over to a new heart server - in fact ive just changed the record now.)

Does anyone else see errors in GWT that arent there when they check?

[intelinside]

Yes, this is precisely what happend to my 301 redirect which I did a month ago.

I assumed that Google Bot accessed my site when the server was sluggish and hence reported the error.

However, it did rectify the error on the subsequent crawls and now it is all fine.

It took me about 20 days to transfer the PR and Backlinks after 301 redirect although some pages are still pending to be re-evaluated by the bot.

[wige]

Both errors mean basically the same thing - I think the difference is in the server response; you get one error if the connection times out, and the other if the server returns an error message. As intelinside mentions, depending on the crawl rate of the affected pages, it may take up to a month for Google to recrawl the page and correct the flow of pagerank.

[inertia]

Cheers guys,

So do you both agree that this would be a highly likely reason for the site to have dropped? And the dodgy shared hosting would explain googlebot getting an error for these redirects?

[wige]

Losing toolbar pagerank is natural, and since tbpr is not live, this likely would not have affected that. However, yes, if you have a lot of links that go through redirects it is very easy for server issues like what you experienced to harm your rankings. This is one major reason why Google strongly recommends converting as many redirected links to direct links to the new URL - even if the server has problems (which Google is designed to tolerate and even account for) your link juice will never be affected by a server outage. With direct links, your rankings should never suffer for a temporary outage like they may when links go through redirects.

[fast1]

what are 301 errors?

[dubbing]

so 301 of a PR 4/2/1 to a site of PR7....will result in loss of page-rank?

in this case will removing of all 301s bring back the original PR7 to the site?

[kevsta]

Originally Posted by fast1

what are 301 errors?

the 301 redirect does not work for Googlebot for some reason

so 301 of a PR 4/2/1 to a site of PR7....will result in loss of page-rank?

in this case will removing of all 301s bring back the original PR7 to the site?

where did anybody mention PR values? we are talking about the real PR that flows not toolbar, which we will never know the values of.

301 redirects do not result in loss of PR. broken ones could (maybe) be Matt's problem here.

not sure where all the speculation about 1, 2, 4's and 7's is coming from?

[davidweb]

Server errors could result in lower SEO rankings. You should always choose a server which is good and reliable.

Moreover, you should always fix errors within Google Webmaster Tool. Ignoring these error messages can result in drop in rankings (sometimes and not always).

You should keep a close tab on your Google Webmaster Tool, and make sure that this error does not resurface again.

This drop in rankings could be temporary since search engines cannot afford to lower rankings permanently on the basis of server responses. It could be temporary for a period of 1-2 months.

[intelinside]

Originally Posted by inertia

Cheers guys,

So do you both agree that this would be a highly likely reason for the site to have dropped? And the dodgy shared hosting would explain googlebot getting an error for these redirects?

Yes !!

But, keep watching your logs and G webmaster tools to get to gist of the problem.

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by davidweb

Moreover, you should always fix errors within Google Webmaster Tool. Ignoring these error messages can result in drop in rankings (sometimes and not always).

You should keep a close tab on your Google Webmaster Tool, and make sure that this error does not resurface again.

This drop in rankings could be temporary since search engines cannot afford to lower rankings permanently on the basis of server responses. It could be temporary for a period of 1-2 months.

All, while G WMT should certainly be watched, note that it can be full of errors and the errors can all be on G's part! Their bot is royally screwed up. The G forums are full of posts about everyone at the same time seeing these "robots.txt not found" and "Network unreachable" errors. That obviously is a G screw up, because all these people, all over the world, are not going to have the same errors at the same time.

And yes, when you see the errors show up, your pages can indeed get deleted from the G index! G of course as always denies there is any problem on their end, but facts are facts and there is no disputing them. All you can do is keep submitting the pages they are showing as "not found" or "unreachable" to all of their DC's, hoping some will be working and pick the pages back up.

This is not to say that all of the errors they report are on their end and you should not investigate them. This is a heads up to not always blindly trust that what WMT area tells you is automatically your own fault.

[inertia]

Ive noticed the network unreachable errors before and im sometime sceptical of GWT. But in this case the errors that have occurred do match the results, if you see what i mean?!

When are they going to stop showing nofollow links is what i want to know!?

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by inertia

Ive noticed the network unreachable errors before and im sometime sceptical of GWT. But in this case the errors that have occurred do match the results, if you see what i mean?!

When are they going to stop showing nofollow links is what i want to know!?

Sure, I was just pointing out that what the WMT shows should not be automatically always be treated as "gospel" and that the site owner is always at fault.

What are the exact lines of code you're using for the redirects? Are you using your htaccess file?

[inertia]

Im using asp redirects because i cant use htaccess on a windows server...

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com/"
%>

Ive just moved the site over to a host who does support isapi so ill be using that when i get chance to set it up but for the moment all the redirects are at page level.

[Clint1]

Ok, I don't know about that. But at you least you posted it and others that do know about Windows servers can take a look at it.

It could be possible this problem started when you moved hosts. Could be due to some downtime, or even something maybe having to do with the DNS of the IP to domain.

[wige]

These errors can happen all the time - all it takes is an ISP hub to go down in the middle of the night somewhere between Google's offices and your web server and everything Google tries to crawl on your site until the error is fixed comes up with error messages.

As I mentioned, in general, the worst case scenario is that Google might miss some updated content - the bot has been designed with the possibility of outages and, as has been stated by Google many times, will not take any action against the site unless the problem persists for days. Usually, from my own experience and others, Google will revisit unavailable content in about two weeks, although factors such as inbound link weight, network issues, average server response times, etc can influence this.

Redirects are simply handled differently.

As far as your question about nofollow links, do you mean how long will it take for Google to deindex a page which has no links that are not marked as nofollow? If so, the answer is approximately, well, never. Once Google knows about a page, and can access that page, it will remain in the index indefinitely even if it has no links at all.

If you want to force the page out of the index, your best bet would be to use a noindex directive in the robots.txt file or add a noindex meta tag.